Civic hackers aim to crack open public data | Minnesota Public Radio News

"After Matt Decuir moved from Seattle to Minneapolis earlier this year, he missed the real-time apps he'd used to find out exactly when Seattle buses or trains would arrive at a stop. Metro Transit tracks each vehicle by GPS, but doesn't present the information in an easily accessible way, Decuir said. At a 'hackathon' organized in June, where programmers gather to brainstorm and collaborate, Decuir and four other programmers decided to tackle the problem directly. Within six hours they had a working website application that uses your location to pull up the real-time arrival of Metro Transit vehicles. You can even use it from a smartphone. 'We saw that we were doing something useful because we had traffic on the site almost immediately,' Decuir said. 'Twitter was blowing up because everyone was like, 'This is so cool, this is way better than the Metro Transit website.' Taking publicly available data and putting it in forms that are more easily digestible for the public is the point of so-called 'civic hacking,' which seeks to provide practical solutions to civic problems by applying data and design. Decuir notes that Minnesotans have at least one pretty good reason to use the app, now named OMG Transit, "Our service is a good utility in the winter for letting you stay inside and stay w arm for longer.' ... Open Twin Cities and the non-profit E-Democracy.org are planning what they call an 'unconference' on Nov. 9 -- essentially a day of workshops and brainstorming on civic issues that will include policy leaders, journalists and programmers ... Advocates of releasing more government information, Open Twin Cities has also started to engage with public policy directly. In early September, the group sent a survey to all Minneapolis mayoral candidates asking for their positions on 'open data' ..."